The Book: A collection of 150 poems (1991-1998) organized into 10 thematic sections, varying by style and subject, with translation by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. It is a grand tour of Paris, the City of Light.

The Poet: Jacques Roubaud has four novels and two books of poetry available in English translation. He is a member of the innovative literary group Oulipo, whose work with form, constraint and memory this collection clearly exemplifies.

The Context: An exploration of the conditions and changes of the beloved city that has inspired so many of the world’s great artists—poets like Rimbaud, Francois Villon, and Baudelaire; painters like Tolouse-Latrec and the Montmartre personalities in dance and music and other entertainments that he immortalized; composers like Michel Legrand; playwrights and theorists such as the four Jeans—Anouilh, Genet, Sartre, Cocteau; and innovative filmmakers like Truffaut and Godard. The poems bring to mind the magnetism that drew famous American expatriates to Paris, from Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald during the café society of the 1920s to rock star turned poet Jim Morrison, who spent his last three and a half months within her arms and whose grave is still one of the main attractions of Père Lachaise cemetery.

The Words: The book begins, quite appropriately, with “Paris,” a 4 line poem after Raymond Queneau (whose influence appears throughout the book—he was also a member of Oulipo):

“The Paris we find to traipse/Is not the one we used to find/And we’re not wild to get to/The Paris we will leave behind”

Over the course of the 247 pages the reader encounters all of Paris’ most famous landmarks—Avenue del’Opéra, Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Bastille, the Tuleries, Rue de Rivoli, the best known cemeteries, the Bibliothéque Nationale, and the Eiffel Tower. This latter monument, perhaps the City’s most famous, spurs Roubaud to write:

“It would indeed be difficult to talk of Paris without talking of the tower” and of other poets: “they have seen it so much that they don’t see it anymore” (“Poem of the Eiffel Tower”).

Like the sense of change with which the collection so fundamentally deals, this idea of the spectacular becoming the familiar and ultimately the foreign is not singular to Paris— it is universal. It is happening in large cities and in small towns no longer small throughout the world.

It is not only the concrete, physical world of the city that is familiar to us, but the conditions of the writers walking her streets as well. “Queneau in November” paints a picture that could be applicable to many late-autumn artists. This exploration of the condition of the artist also appears in “Among a lot of Poems”:

“A poem I wrote with my feet/As I compose all my poems/Silently in my head walking”

and more cryptically in the poem “Informal Intimate Ode...”:

“I’ve grown stopped growing begun to grow”

Roubaud is obviously a lover of language and an adept when it comes to wordplay, and this collection has a little bit of something for just about everyone’s tastes, from the rhyming couplets of “Place du General-Brocard” to the “pictopoems,” or what one could call word art, on pgs. 176-77. Other notable examples include “Rue Jonas” and “Plesent Streets.” An extreme example is “Impasse de Nevers,” which uses an almost Joycean experimentation with language. Along the same lines, there is an interesting permutation of sentences using the words black, grave and street in “Undated Night, Rue Saint- Jacques.” Roubaud makes interesting use of nested parens and the mathematical construction of language in the abstract as well as in the concrete in the form of such things as street addresses, arrondissements (subdivisions of an administrative district), and license plates.

Overall there is a nice balance of complexity/simplicity and abstract/concrete, although the more extreme wordplay and experimentation with language ride the edge of pretension and cleverness along the lines of T.S. Eliot. There is also the more philosophically questionable pieces, such as “Invitation to the Voyage” (a list of cities and other places from A-W) and the section “Hommage to Sebastien Bottin’s Telephone Directory,” which beg the reader to ask that unfortunate and thorny question—Is this even poetry?

But, more to the point, does such a label as “poetry” even matter? It is inevitable that when an artist is testing boundaries over a considerable span of time and experience, that some things will work better than others and will apply less or more to the individual reader’s own tastes and sensibilities.

Because of the considerable scope and style of the 150 poems in the collection, it would have been interesting to hear the translators’ thoughts on handling this aspect of their work. (There is no translators’ foreword or other elucidations beyond the very helpful endnotes on the poems and poets, etc. that the poems reference. I have always found the translators of poetry—especially that which is experimental or particularly abstract or philosophical—to have wonderful insights into the way they work. Thomas Merton’s notes on his translation of the Way of Chuang Tzu or Edward Fitzgerald’s on Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam come clearly to mind. Note: I did recently receive a notice through a Listserv that Keith Waldrop has a new translation out of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil that is billed as groundbreaking.

The section entitled “Six Logical Pieces” bears comment. It is a series of philosophical dialogues with an interesting format. There are two poems per subsection, that alternate between the concrete (5 street poems and 1 about Time, the latter bringing to mind Gertrude Stein) following a predecessor poem that is far more abstract. There was additional translation help from Norma Cole and Michael Palmer in this section.

I found the 20 Sonnets to not be Roubaud’s strongest, most easily flowing form, although there were some simply stated yet very profound insights offered that brought to mind the poems of Rod McKuen. There is also an interesting use of footnotes in Sonnet XII as compared with the unnecessary editorial footnotes in Sonnets V and XV— I would much prefer it if such illuminations were left to the reader to discover on his or her own.

Other Thoughts:

The Section Square des Blancs-Manteaux 1983, Meditation on Death, in Sonnets reminds me of Gregory Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death, and was a very thought- provoking read.

The prose poems “Square Louis-XVI” and “Our Kings” (pgs. 57-58) seem so appropriate in the aftermath of the 2001 atmosphere of strained U.S.–French war relations.

At the risk of following too closely in the footnotes that I criticized above, I suggest a careful read of the two dream poems on pages 78-79.for the subtle differences they contain.

“Quiet Days at Porte d’Orleans” (both a section title and series of poems) has a little bit of everything, from 2- to 3-line poems consisting of funny little observations to more complex pieces. There are very subtle changes in the three poems from 1991, 1993, and 1995 that share the name with the section. They are worth the time it takes to compare them.

“Pont Mirabeau” is worth mentioning because it contains a footnote that generates a second footnote—something I have never seen in my sixteen years of writing and editing artistic and scholarly works. I say, it’s about time.

In Closing:

For its varied considerations of one of the world’s most interesting cities, its scope and experimentation and sense of fun, Jacques Roubaud’s latest book of poetry deserves a place on the shelf of the lover of Paris, the poet, and the enthusiastic student of the poetic form.